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Citation: 15 Harv. Women's L.J. 295 1992

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BOOK REVIEWS

By Iris Marion
Young. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990. 286
pages. $12.95.
JUSTICE AND THE POLITICS OF DIFFERENCE.

Iris Marion Young's Justice and the Politics of Difference endeavors to assess how the experiences and demands of progressive group-based social movements should influence contemporary political theory. Specifically, Young articulates claims about
justice that are implicit in left-wing activism1 and brings them to
bear upon the more philosophical discussions of justice that circulate among academics. Her insistence that political philosophers pay closer attention to the experiences of disadvantaged
groups, as well as to the insights and demands of activist movements, prompts her to forward a number of criticisms about
contemporary approaches to justice, and to advance proposals
for a more satisfactory program.
Young asserts that contemporary theories of justice have focused on an overly narrow range of issues concerning distributive
justice, without devoting sufficient attention to unjust conditions
of domination and oppression that do not arise from distributive
inequality. Such theories, she claims, downplay or entirely ignore
pertinent issues regarding the division of power, hierarchy and
bureaucracy, labor conditions, the extraeconomic dynamics of
racism and sexism, the structure of the family, and issues of
cultural imperialism. 2
Young also contends that liberal theorists futilely aspire to
achieve neutrality and impartiality but succeed only in universalizing the experiences of those who hold power. Instead, she
recommends a more concrete approach--one that not only acknowledges differences among social groups, but also actively
I Young explicitly draws upon the discourse and experience of a wide panoply of
individuals and organizations, including democratic socialists, environmentalists, Blacks,
Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, Native Americans, opponents of U.S. military intervention,
gay men and lesbians, the disabled, the old, and the poor. (p. 7)
2 See, for instance, Young's claim that dependence in marriage and exploitation in
sexual relationships are not alleviated by a more equitable distribution of goods. (p. 50)

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advocates for and affirms group differences and characteristics.

Moreover, she suggests that philosophers of justice should not
think exclusively in an abstract manner, but should also engage
in phenomenological inquiry, and consider how aspects of bodily
experience may affect views about the content of and means to
achieve justice.
An impressive array of theorists and influences informs
Young's discussion. She draws upon the contributions of analytical philosophers such as John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin; feminist theorists such as Nadine Taub, Wendy Williams, and Evelyn
Fox Keller; legal scholars such as Roberto Unger, Martha Minow,
and Cass Sunstein; postmodernists including Jacques Derrida,
Luce Irigaray, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Julia Kristeva; as well
as sociologists, historians, and nonacademic members of activist
movements. (p. 7) Remarkably, Young manages to discuss these
disparate thinkers without sacrificing clarity and accessibility.
Such an accomplishment is rare. Many efforts to synthesize postmodem and analytic approaches have failed, in part, because
analytical philosophers often find the work of postmodern thinkers too obfuscatory and inaccessible, whereas postmodernists
tend to lump analytical philosophers together and to dismiss them
on themes, failing to differentiate among the nuanced versions of
their varied theories.3 As Young is well acquainted with both
approaches, she makes some laudable progress toward facilitating
the conversation between the two by recasting many postmodemists' claims into language familiar to liberals.
Young's project also deserves attention for its provocative
charge that liberal philosophers have failed to accommodate the
needs and interests of various marginalized groups, given that
prominent contemporary accounts of justice have been at pains
to emphasize that traditional approaches to justice have dealt
inadequately with questions of equality and inclusion. A recurrent
claim in Young's critique is that liberalism overattends to individuals, according only derivative notice to social groups. Membership in social groups, she notes, plays a significant role in
comprising one's identity. Unlike associations that one voluntarily joins, social groups, organized around race, gender, age, etc.,
3 Cf. BERNARD WILLIAMS, ETHICS AND THE LIMITS OF PHILOSOPHY viii, 220 n.11
(1985) (observations about analytic method and Critical Theory).

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are entities in which one finds one is a member. (p. 46) Such
group membership, Young argues, is both inescapable and salutory: inescapable because even the alleviation of oppression will
not dissipate the existence of social groups, and salutory because
such groups can play a crucial role in ending oppression and
domination.
Young opposes what she labels the "Enlightenment" approach
to liberation, achieved through assimilation or transcendence of
group difference. Rather, dominated groups should engage in
positive self-definition and affirmation and should resist the
repression and denigration of their unique characteristics. "Only
if oppressed groups are able to express their interests and experience in the public on an equal basis with other groups can group
domination through formally equal processes of participation be
avoided." (p. 95) For such self-assertion to overcome prejudice,
to change the meaning of difference from "otherness, . . . [to]
specificity, variation, heterogeneity," (p. 171) affirmative mea-

sures must be taken to ensure that marginalized groups gain

access to the social forum on an equal footing. This may entail
separate and exclusive organizations for oppressed groups so
they may engage in consciousness raising and amass power. At
the political level, Young contends that group-impact statements
should be a mandatory component of policy analysis, and moreover, that groups should be guaranteed representation in policymaking forums and afforded special veto power. (pp. 186-91)
Such representation, she believes, might lead to more accommodating pregnancy leave policies, to the promotion of bilingual
education as an end in itself rather than as a mere means to
enhance fluency in English, (p. 179) and to cession of absolute

self-determination rights to Native Americans. (pp. 175-83)

Although Young is correct that, historically, liberal philosophers have not accorded sufficient attention to oppressed groups
and the duties owed to them,4 the book falters in its contention
4 In light of this argument, the absence of reference to philosopher-economist Amartya
Sen's work is a striking omission. Sen has done extensive empirical research on the
condition of oppressed people and has explicitly drawn connections between the condition
of the oppressed and analytic conceptions ofjustice and welfare. Some of his more recent
work has paid particular attention to women. See Amartya Sen, Justice: Means versus
Freedoms, 19 PHIL. & PUB. AFF. 111 (1990); Sen, More Than 100 Million Women Are
Missing, 37 N.Y. REv. BOOKs 61 (Dec. 20, 1990).

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that these culpable oversights result from defects in liberal theory,

(pp. 4-8) rather than from the overly narrow focus of particular
liberal thinkers. Her unsympathetic readings of her liberal opponents frequently lead her to underestimate the radical potential
of, as well as the powerful defenses left open to, liberalism.
For instance, Young criticizes the liberal "equal treatment"
approach to pregnancy leave which argues that pregnancy leave
and benefits should fall under more generic, gender-neutral policies relevant to physical conditions that render people unable to
work. Young objects that this approach "either implies that
women do not have any right to leave and job security when
having babies, or assimilates such guarantees under the supposedly gender-neutral category of 'disability'.

. .

. Assimilating

pregnancy and childbirth to disability tends to stigmatize these

processes as 'unhealthy."' (p. 176) Young may be right that pregnancy does not fit tightly into the category of disability and she
correctly diagnoses a frequently hostile attitude toward pregnancy and disability. Theoretically, however, her argument fails
to take account of her own group-affirmation stance. Her complaint about the equal treatment approach can be only a contingent one, because liberals should accept her arguments that positive associations must be forged with the unique characteristics
of oppressed groups, (p. 166) and specifically that ableism, with

its associations of disability with the abject, must be rejected.

Hence, classifying pregnancy as a disability becomes per se offensive and stigmatizing only if one buys into the negative stereotypes of disability that Young persuades liberals (and the rest
of us) to reject.
Young's attacks on liberals are not directed just at liberal policies but extend to liberal theory as well. One of her main contentions is that contemporary theorists of justice consider only
issues of wealth and income distribution, while neglecting more
urgent issues such as the right to meaningful work, control over
one's community, the division of labor, and issues of power
within the family. (p. 19) She concludes that the philosophical

orientation toward distributive justice should yield to one in

which an analysis of oppression and power is central.
Young's criticisms, however, reflect a questionable conflation
of the philosophical liberal's end-vision with the features of the
modem welfare state. (pp. 51-56) Liberal politicians may suggest

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such an equation, but philosophical liberal theory does not envision the welfare state as a desirable end-point nor as a prototype
of liberal models of economic equality. Liberal theorists, such as
Rawls and Dworkin, cannot fairly be accused of focusing only
on material goods while indiscriminately bracketing issues of
freedom, power, and institutional organization. Dworkin's list of
the resources to be distributed equally in a liberal scheme is not
crudely limited to a menu of tangible, fungible items; 5 far from
it, he devotes entire articles to issues of equal and meaningful
access to political power and social opportunity, articles that
Young does not criticize specifically.6 So too with Rawls, who
devotes his entire project to assessing how a just structure of
basic social institutions might be organized, and whose list of
primary goods includes not only power and opportunity, but goes
that underlie self-respect
so far as to identify the social conditions
7
good.
primary
important
as the most
Rawls' and Dworkin's efforts in these areas merit only a brief
mention by Young. She argues that the inclusion of power, opportunity, and the conditions underlying self-respect on a list of
primary goods is unsatisfactory since such things are ill-suited to
distributional treatment. She maintains, for example, that power
is a "relation" and not a "thing," and moreover, that distributional
theories embody an atomistic bias that gives short shrift to the
structural roots of oppression. (p. 27) These criticisms are puzzling and unsatisfying. First, Young implicitly approves of distributive accounts as partial means to achieve justice and specifically
does not contest their ability to allocate possession and ownership
rights over material goods. Yet, "possession" and "ownership,"
just as much as "power," are also arguably "relations and not
things," and further, relations susceptible of being socially structured in a variety of ways. Thus, characterizing power as a relation and not a thing is insufficient to challenge the distributive
approach. Second, sophisticated liberal theorists, unlike their
politician counterparts, primarily attend to the justice of the social
5 See Ronald Dworkin, What is Equality? Part2: Equality of Resources 10 PHIL. &
PUB. AFF. 283 (1981).
6 See Ronald Dworkin, What is Equality? Part 3: The Place of Liberty 73 IowA L.
REv. 1 (1988); Dworkin, What is Equality? Part4: Political Equality 22 U.S.F. L. Rav.

1(1987).

7 JOHN RAWLS, A THEORY OF JUSTICE 90-95, 178-83, 440-46, 541-48 (1971).

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structure taken as a whole, and do not manifest naive confidence

in the power of any single grant of resources or rights to combat
oppression, absent supportive underlying social structures.
The point is not to deny Young's charge that liberals generally
deal inadequately with the issues she spotlights, but rather to
question whether she has identified correctly the source of their
failure, and to challenge her strong insistence that liberalism is
intrinsically incapable of grappling with these issues. This concern is worth stressing since Young's criticisms are unnecessarily
impolitic. Educating liberals to be more sensitive to the concerns
and needs of oppressed groups is a worthwhile task, since more
stands to be gained by enlisting liberal support than by fostering
divisions between the marginalized and their traditional
supporters.
Young's apparent indifference to this strategic concern is surprising, given her sensitivity to strategy at other junctures, made
evident by her defense of appeals to "justice" for their continuing
power to motivate critical evaluation of social practices. Activist
philosophers, she suggests, should harness the motivating power
of the term "justice" and apply it to neglected territory instead
of forsaking its use entirely. (pp. 34-36) As Young notes:
Appeals to justice still have the power to awaken a moral
imagination and motivate people to look at their society
critically, and ask how it can be made more liberating and
enabling. Philosophers interested in nurturing this emancipatory imagination . . . should . . . lay claim to the term
justice rather than abandon it. (pp. 35-36)
Much the same can be said for revamping liberal theory.
There are more positive arguments to recommend the liberal
approach to justice, however, apart from its capacity to accommodate Young's concerns. First, against her contention that "social justice means the elimination of institutionalized domination
and oppression," (p. 15) we might think, along with liberals, that
rather more is desired: that a more sweeping equality of condition
is to be sought and not simply the alleviation of duress. Moreover,
there is much to be said for placing a predominant emphasis upon
equality of resource distribution, especially in light of Young's
aim to articulate positive group identities. That is, liberals may

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easily concur with Young that economic redistribution alone will

not achieve justice, (p. 55) while nonetheless observing that a
greater approximation of economic equality may be a precondition to the development of a freely chosen group identity. 8 Lacking sufficient social resources to make substantively free choices,
affirmations of group identity may result in misguided valorization
of the conditions and artifacts of oppression. Freedom and distance from coercive economic duress seem necessary to determine which qualities and characteristics of the group should be
viewed as constitutive of it as opposed to those which are merely
reactions to deprivation. 9
Young's onslaught against distributive justice is only one of
her multifarious criticisms of liberalism and analytic approaches
to justice. Drawing on strands of feminist theory, Young attacks
the predominant methodology of analytic philosophers, in particular their advocacy of impartiality and concurrent neglect of
phenomenology. The push toward impartiality, she claims, has
often facilitated the exclusion of women and racial ethnic men
from the public sphere. In part, such exclusion arises out of a
socially prevalent association of men of color and women with
bodily and affective aspects of human existence, which approaches favoring "rationality" typically denigrate. Young claims
that impartial thinking requires an undesirable and impossible
abstraction from the particular viewpoint of the thinker. Ultimately, she believes that attempts to achieve impartiality resort
to the experience of the dominant and prominent as the standard,
"normal" perspective of evaluation. As a result, impartial reasoning simply mirrors social oppression and obscures the alternative and diverse perspectives of the marginalized. (pp. 96-122)
8 Such a concern should resonate with Young, for she assails liberal neutrality for
reflecting power differentials created by unequal access to resources. (p. 114) Taken as a
theoretical objection against neutrality, however, her use of this point rings somewhat
schizophrenic, given that it follows an extensive characterization of liberalism as preoccupied with equalizing resource distribution. Although on Young's description we should
expect liberals to fall short when it comes to countering extraeconomic mechanisms of
oppression, the least we should expect is that liberal neutrality would not be compromised
by inattention to the consequences of inequitable resource distribution.
9 Of course, some of the qualities groups treasure about themselves may be valuable
reactions to and outgrowths of their oppression. Still, access to adequate levels of resources will help to distinguish these qualities from those whose value lies only in their
adaptive, stopgap nature. Cf. Jon Elster's discussion of adaptive preference formation in

SOUR GRAPEs (1983).

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Young's critique, standard among many critics of liberalism,

may indeed describe accurately the shortcomings of many advocates of impartiality, but it is not clear that these prejudices
and failures of breadth in perspective are endemic to impartial
theories. On the contrary, one wants to insist that liberals can do
better and that impartiality, given its commitment to treat all
equally, demands further efforts to understand and incorporate
all perspectives and not just the dominant ones. Young nods at
this argument, pursued by Susan Moller Okin, 0 but, citing the
doubts of Marilyn Friedman, dismisses the idea that any one
thinker can take the needs and feelings of others fully into account, for such an effort "denies the difference among subjects
...

[W]hen class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and age define

different social locations, one subject cannot fully sympathize

with another in a different social location, adopt her point of
view; if that were possible then the social locations would not be
different." (p. 105)
Young's point, as well as the exact identity of her target, is
difficult to make out." At times, she seems to be saying that no
one thinker could achieve accurate and universal empathy or
even a full understanding of the experiences and valid claims of
others. (p. 106) If so, this is to be conceded. Such a concession,
however, is wholly unremarkable, since advocates of impartiality
have never realistically contended that a monological (or singlestandpoint) approach, from the "outset," will produce favorable
results or that theorists should reason from isolated standpoints
on the basis of well-motivated speculation. That does not mean,
however, that they should not aim for an end-point consensus
that incorporates all the various perspectives articulated in an
active exchange, and that itself acts as a normative standpoint
that all may adopt. Likewise, though we will never inhabit each
10See, e.g., Susan Moiler Okin, Justice and Gender 16 PHIL. & PUB. AFF. 42 (1987).
" Unfortunately, Young's criticisms of impartiality are often obscure and insufficiently
fleshed out. At one point, she complains that the "logic of identity," a label she affixes
to impartiality, "flees from the sensuous particularity of experience" and thereby "denies
the difference between object and subject." (p. 98) Not only is it unclear how such
conflation is achieved, but on the very next page, she objects that the logic of identity
has given fodder to a vast number of simplistic, binary oppositions, including the "subject/
object" distinction. (p. 99) One is left unsure whether the logic of identity neglects this
distinction or, alternatively, places inordinate stress on it, and, in either case, why these
complaints constitute grounds for abjuring impartiality.

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and every possible perspective, this does not mean that we cannot
successfully understand unavailable perspectives sufficiently to
take their insights seriously and to treat their inhabitants equally
for the purposes of justice.
If Young has a deeper objection in mind, it may accomplish
too much; specifically, it may disarm the power of her proposals.
If her claim is that even genuine attempts at impartial reasoning
necessarily must fail because robust understanding of the perspectives of others cannot be achieved, then doubt is generated
about her suggestion to have empowered group representatives
articulate their perspectives in the public forum. Even if all the
group perspectives are fairly aired, they cannot be adequately
taken in, since, according to Young, full understanding of the
positions of others and/or sympathy is unattainable by any one
person engaged in the public dialogue. The essential difference
between subjects which mysteriously prevents successful impartial thought, as well as the universalizing tendencies of privileged
groups, should also obstruct individual members of social groups
from emerging from the social dialogue with a consensus about
the content of justice that reflects all of the group views and can
be articulated by each of its adherents. Young faces a dilemma:
either her position is not a true counterpoise against impartiality,
but instead a revisionist critique of its misguided uses, or her
arguments against impartiality are successful, but have the unhappy side-effect of generating pessimism about the progressive
possibilities of a politics of group difference.
Thus, while Young's aim, to integrate attention to the experience of the marginalized with philosophical approaches to justice,
is promising, her book ultimately disappoints. Her efforts to construct a theoretical chasm between her approach and that of
contemporary liberalism are both unpersuasive and misplaced.
She would have done better to present a more fully fleshed-out
version of her intriguing proposals and programs for a politics of
group difference, to recognize the bridges that connect liberalism
and the claims of oppressed groups, and to incite liberals to cross
them.
-Seana Shiffrin

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